The Process of Establishing a BPM Program

The process of launching a BPM initiative comprises six steps: defining the company's current state, defining its desired future state, defining the changes necessary to reach that future state, determining the activities required to bring about that change, identifying the project's value and goals, and developing the implementation plan. (For more on these steps, see the online-exclusive sidebar at the end of this article.) Experience shows that problems often arise when companies don't fully complete these six steps, when they don't perform them with enough attention to detail, or when they are too tactically or technically focused. To ensure their success, BPM champions need to include the following actions in the development of their performance management initiative.

Link BPM to recognized business needs. The best way to get off on the right foot with any project is to ensure that it addresses recognized business needs which are important to key stakeholders. One such example is the need to measure IT value. Despite investments in tools such as IT scorecards, organizations continue to have difficulty expressing this value in clear business terms. By integrating planned and actual data from budgeting, scorecarding, and activity-based costing systems, BPM can provide information like that in exhibit 1 below. Such information is highly valuable to senior management, especially the CIO, so providing clarity about the potential for this type of capability can be important to winning support for the project.